Ladies and Germs, in this corner, we have a man. A pathetic pile of a meatbag, with skin completely incapable of preventing major lacerations. Loaded with pain receptacles that will severely dampen his ability to keep up in an environment where the hurt will lay into them endlessly and mercilessly. Only the human spirit can give this pathetic creature any hope for survival.

And in this corner, we have the automaton. Perfect in every conceivable way, invulnerable to the wear and tear so common in humans, working tirelessly as long as it can maintain a power source. The machine has no sense of remorse or mercy and will do whatever is commanded of it to the bitter end. Alas, the machine lacks one thing- Love.

Who will win? Well, that's a question for the plot. Given that good guys almost always succeed, bet on that horse first- but more often than not it's the human we're supposed to be rooting for. Since God help us if the robot revolution comes and they really are better than us.

Interestingly, the machines will sometime be said to "never get ill" and "never age". If that were true, there would be no need for repairmen nor scrapyards. This generally gets a pass because a machine sufficiently advanced to challenge man would by definition be capable of self-maintenance and, likely, self-improvement to the point it would outlast anything built by man.

See Rock Beats Laser for this concept applied more broadly to technological disparities in general. This trope is concerned primarily with the struggle of human characters against robots specifically.

Examples:

The Matrix shows this as the aftermath of the Robot War. The humans firmly believe that the use of their own human spirit is the only thing separating them from the machines, and is the only real advantage they have.

And it was averted humorously in the Transformers: Hearts of Steel miniseries - where the steam drill suddenly stood up and said (effectively) "We don't have to challenge each other - why don't we be friends, instead? My name is Bumblebee!"

Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox get in on the act, too, when they go up against the mechanized saw in a tree-cutting contest. Interestingly, Paul loses (by a quarter of an inch, in Walt Disney's version).

Death/Bill Door versus the combine harvester in Reaper Man, though this is a slightly unfair one, given the whole anthropomorphic personification of Death thing...

Not really... so is the Combine. Also, Death reaps one stalk at a time.

The John Henry legend is spoofed in Dave Barry in Cyberspace, which tells a story of the first computer ever built that Dave Barry was definitely making up:

The man responsible was inventor Elias Smurton, who in 1807 built his revolutionary steam-powered computer, the Data Belle, which featured a fourteen-ton floppy diskette that required forty men and a team of horses to insert. Seeking to publicize his invention, Smurton staged a computing contest between his machine and one of the leading mathematicians of the day, John "Henry" LaFromage. In a dramatic demonstration of the awesome potential of automated data processing, the human competition was literally "blown away" when the Data Belle, attempting to add 2 and 7, exploded with such force that what was believed to be LaFromage's pancreas was found nearly four miles away. Clearly, nobody was going to stand in the way of this amazing new technology.

Legends of Dune in the Butlerian Jihad humanity was enslaved by the Thinking Machines, they overthrew the machines and banned anything similar to an AI. Later in the sequels the Thinking Machines are back and their out for revenge against the humans.

Battlestar Galactica (Reimagined) has this as an explicit ongoing theme, with humans relying on chunky old-fashioned machines with a lot of manual controls. The Cylons, by contrast, are robots with incredibly sexy starships.

Spoofed in Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode Time Chasers: Near the end of the film, the protagonist is climbing down a tree to get away from a crashed light aircraft that's threatening to fall on himnote Very reminiscent of Jurassic Park, which is indeed lampshaded. The MST crew identifies this as an example of Man Versus Machine - and immediately begin cheering "Goooo machine!"

In one episode of How I Met Your Mother, every member of the group think that they have the fastest way to get across town (bus, subway, faking a heart attack to steal a ride on an ambulance, cab etc...). Marshall claims that he can run the whole seven miles faster than any machine. To his credit, everyone gets to the half-way point at the exact same time, meaning he backed up his claim fairly well. However, he only makes it another mile or two before he collapses on the sidewalk out of exhaustion, confessing that his bravado was really about being worried he might not be able to get his wife pregnant.

Team Fortress 2's August 2012 update introduced a cooperative game mode aptly titled "Mann Vs. Machine" where the RED team squares off against robot knockoffs of the game's classes (except the Engineer, who was added in a later update), created by Redmond and Blutarch Mann's long lost brother Gray Mann.

The TaleSpin episode "From Here to Machinery" has an inventor introducing the Auto-Aviator, a robot pilot. To much fanfare, Baloo competes with the Auto-Aviator in a race; unfortunately, he loses to the tireless machine, with devastating results as the successful demonstration puts the Auto-Aviator in the limelight and many pilots out of a job. However, it turns out that the Auto-Aviator has a crushing weakness: its inability to deviate from its flight plan under any circumstances, even when the plane is in danger, and Shere Khan's own plane, piloted by one of the machines, ends up flying right into an Air Pirate attack. In the end, Baloo saves the day, and Shere Khan sees that the inventor is left peddling his robots in the frozen wastes ofThembria.

The SpongeBob SquarePants episode "SpongBob Vs. the Patty Gadget" has Squidward obtaining a machine that creates Krabby Patties and challenging SpongeBob for his job. SpongeBob wins when Squidward cranks the machine too high and it overloads.

Courage the Cowardly Dog had such an episode ("Courage vs. Mecha-Courage") where Courage ended up going up against his robotic doppelganger in a contest. The maker intended to prove the robot dog was 'better' and... he was. The one thing it lacked, however, was Courage's tenacity. In the end, it finally broke down, leaving Courage, battered and bruised, the winner by default.

In one episode of CJ the DJ, CJ has to win a DJing contest against a robotic DJ.

Gary Kasparov versus Deep Blue in Chess. Though as someone noted, humans programmed Deep Blue and Kasporov had electronic assistance himself and it might be more accurate to call it Chessmaster versus Techno Wizard.

Some years later, IBM's Watsonnote IBM also developed Deep Blue was put on Jeopardy against two human champions including Ken Jenningsnote He of the 75-day winning streak. The computer cleaned their clocks, and in the last Final Jeopardy, Jennings wrote as his response "I for one welcomeour new computer overlords."

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